And how many other voices hath the mighty sea! Even when least agitated, how her wailings and her deep sighs contrast with the dull dead silence of the deserted shore, which seems to expect, in mute terror, the threatening of that mighty mass which so recently laved it with a gentle and caressing wavelet. And will she not speedily fulfil her threat? I know not, and will not anticipate. I will not, just now, at least, speak of those terrible concerts in which, haply, she ere long will take the principal part; of her duets with the rocks, of the basses, those muttered thunders which she utters in the deep caverns of the rocky shore, or of those strange, wild, weird, shrieking tones in which we seem to recognize the "Help, spare, save me!" of some tortured or fearfully imperilled humanity. No; let us, for the present, contemplate her in her calmer moods; when she is strong, indeed, but not violent.
THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND THE IRON-BOUND COAST.
We need not be at all surprised if childhood and ignorance are astounded, astonied, when they first find themselves face to face with that vast and mysterious Sphinx of the Great Master's sculpture, the Ocean. Why, in fact, should we be astonished by their gaze of mingled awe, admiration and bewilderment, when we ourselves, despite our early culture and life-long experience, see so much in the great Riddle of that great Sphinx which we cannot even hope to explain?
What is the real extent of the ocean? That it is greater than that of the earth is about as much as, conscientiously, we can at all positively affirm. On the entire surface of our globe, water is the Generality—land the Exception. But what is their relative proportion? That, water covers four-fifths of the globe is probable, though, some say a third or a fourth. It is difficult, not to say impossible, to answer the question precisely. A bold explorer discovers a polar land, lays it down, latitude and longitude, with scientific precision; in the very next year an equally bold and no less scientific adventurer seeks it in vain; and in all latitudes immense shoals and lovely Coral islands form in the dark depths, rise to the surface, and disappear, just as suddenly and unaccountably as they arose.
The real depth of the sea is still less known to us than its extent; we are only at the mere commencement of our early, few, and imperfect soundings.
The daring little liberties which we take with the surface of the invincible element, and the confidence with which we go hither and thither upon its unsounded depths, have really nothing to say against the grand and well-founded pride of the Ocean, impenetrable as she is as to her secrets, ever moving yet unchangeable, a reality, yet, in all but a few of her phenomena, as unreal to us as the spectres of our actual dreaming. That those mighty depths contain a whole world, a marvellously great and diversified world, of life, love, war, and reproduction of all sorts and sizes, we must imagine and may already with confidence affirm; but we have only, and barely, touched upon the threshold of that world. We are in such a hurry to leave that strange and hostile element! If we need the Ocean, see ye, my brothers, the Ocean in no wise needs us. Nature, fresh from the hand of Deity, scorns the too prying gaze and the too shallow judgment of finite but presumptuous man.